Improvements in communication technology have enabled coffee shops, restaurants, and other retail establishments to offer network connectivity to patrons (e.g., access to an Internet). Furthermore, some large chain retail establishments (e.g., such as Starbucks®, McDonalds®, and others) have enabled each of their retail locations with wired and wireless network connectivity for patrons (e.g., through “hot spots” created using a gateway device such as an access point device, and/or through a physical Ethernet port).
In one scenario, a patron wishing to access the Internet wirelessly through a laptop may enter a coffee shop offering wireless Internet service. After detecting a presence of a gateway device (e.g., a nearby access point device, and/or a nearby security device), the laptop may indicate the strength of an available wireless connection, and may redirect a browser on the laptop to an authentication page (e.g., and/or authentication file) physically stored within a memory on the gateway device.
The authentication page or pages may be generated using a mark-up language data such as, for example, HTML (hypertext markup language), requiring the patron to enter authentication information (e.g., a user name, a password, credit card information, etc.). Before the patron is permitted to access the Internet (e.g., and/or other network), the authentication page may require validation (e.g., through a Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) server) to ensure that the patron has paid the required fee and/or is permitted access to restricted content (e.g., it should be noted that the authentication page may require validation for both wired and wirelessly associated patrons). The authentication page may also include marketing information (e.g., such as promotions, specials, announcements, coffee specials, coupons, weather, etc.).
When a coffee shop headquarters has new marketing information for patrons using network connectivity, the coffee shop headquarters may instruct each of their retail locations to manually replace the authentication page on each gateway device within each retail location. For example, this may require each retail location of the coffee shop to temporarily disrupt network service and reconfigure the gateway device with a new authentication page. If a particular retail location of the coffee shop forgets to update to the new authentication page, outdated information may be displayed to patrons resulting in a less than perfect patron experience (e.g., loss of marketing opportunity, patron confusion, misrepresentation, etc.). In addition, replacing authentication pages at each retail location when the new marketing information is made public is expensive and cumbersome because skilled employee time is required to replace old authentication pages.